Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays eBook

Now the ordinary version of recent English history
that most moderately educated people have absorbed
from childhood is something like this. That
we emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all
the power and wealth were in the hands of Kings and
a few nobles; that the King’s power was broken
first and then in due time that of the nobles, that
this piece-meal improvement was brought about by one
class after another waking up to a sense of citizenship
and demanding a place in the national councils, frequently
by riot or violence; and that in consequence of such
menacing popular action, the franchise was granted
to one class after another and used more and more
to improve the social conditions of those classes,
until we practically became a democracy, save for such
exceptions as that of the women. I do not think
anyone will deny that something like that is the general
idea of the educated man who reads a newspaper and
of the newspaper that he reads. That is the
view current at public schools and colleges; it is
part of the culture of all the classes that count for
much in government; and there is not one word of truth
in it from beginning to end.

That Great Reform Bill

Wealth and political power were very much more popularly
distributed in the Middle Ages than they are now;
but we will pass all that and consider recent history.
The franchise has never been largely and liberally
granted in England; half the males have no vote and
are not likely to get one. It was never
granted in reply to pressure from awakened sections
of the democracy; in every case there was a perfectly
clear motive for granting it solely for the convenience
of the aristocrats. The Great Reform Bill was
not passed in response to such riots as that which
destroyed a Castle; nor did the men who destroyed the
Castle get any advantage whatever out of the Great
Reform Bill. The Great Reform Bill was passed
in order to seal an alliance between the landed aristocrats
and the rich manufacturers of the north (an alliance
that rules us still); and the chief object of that
alliance was to prevent the English populace
getting any political power in the general excitement
after the French Revolution. No one can read
Macaulay’s speech on the Chartists, for instance,
and not see that this is so. Disraeli’s
further extension of the suffrage was not effected
by the intellectual vivacity and pure republican theory
of the mid-Victorian agricultural labourer; it was
effected by a politician who saw an opportunity to
dish the Whigs, and guessed that certain orthodoxies
in the more prosperous artisan might yet give him
a balance against the commercial Radicals. And
while this very thin game of wire-pulling with the
mere abstraction of the vote was being worked entirely
by the oligarchs and entirely in their interests, the
solid and real thing that was going on was the steady
despoiling of the poor of all power or wealth, until
they find themselves to-day upon the threshold of
slavery. That is The Working Man’s History
of England.